Rosgrove Raptors

Our Big Question

How can we use the Netbooks to connect to the wider community?

Our presentation

Step 1 - Create blogs for our students

We used a combination of the Edublogs and Global Student platforms for our student blogs.

Global Student is the Campus edition of Edublogs, purchased by the DEECD for free use by all Victorian students. There is also a teacher version called Global Teacher.

Step 2 - The Student Blogging Challenge

The Student Blogging Challenge is a free challenge coordinated by Sue Wyatt, a Middle School teacher in Tasmania, with help from Sue Waters, editor of The Edublogger and the Community Facilitator for Edublogs.

The challenge sees over 1000 students from 15 different countries, ranging from grade 2 classes through to students in senior school, completing a series of weekly tasks designed to help them (and their teachers) learn about blogging and commenting.

The challenge runs from September to December and is in its second year.

The weekly challenges included:

• visiting and commenting on other participants' blogs (including using HTML code in comments)
• learning about digital footprints
• using creative commons images
• participating in the Blog Action Day
• adding and customising widgets (one of the kids' favourites)

Intended Outcomes

1. Having students use blogs would allow parents to gain an insight into the teaching and learing occurring in the classroom.
2. We hoped that the blogs would give the students an authentic audience and improve their efforts at writing.
3. The Student Blogging Challenge would take the pressure off the teachers to explicitly teach their students how to blog and allow the entire classroom to learn together. This was especially important we were not all confident or experienced in using blogs.

Achieved Outcomes

1. Global Citizens
   • Students were visiting and being visited by other students and teachers from around Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Scotland, Mexico, Thailand, Greece, Venezuela, Chile and Hong Kong.
   • This meant that a post couldn't simply be about their favourite AFL team as they were communicating to an audience that had no idea what AFL was.
   • We found similar issues with posts about netball, bushfires, the beach, the weather and the Melbourne Cup.
   • Students had to consider their audience before posting.
2. Literacy Skills
   • Students were actively engaged in rich literacy tasks that went beyond just reading and writing.
   • Their blogs gave them a credible and authentic audience that saw marked improvements in the quality of their writing.
3. Student Empowerment
   • Students enjoyed discovering new things and them sharing them with their classmates.
   • The structure of the classroom changed with the students striving to learn new things to show everyone (including other teachers), rather than having a teacher explicitly direct them.
4. Reflective Questioning
   • The blogs became an effective medium for students to complete reflective questioning at the end of lessons and/or the day.
   • This allowed students to articulate and share their learning with their audience.
   • Will's list of the types of questions he hoped his kids might answer provided a great bank of reflective questions that our kids enjoyed answering.
5. Teaching Teachers
   • Students quickly became experts at blogging and became valuable resources for teachers who wanted to learn and improve their blogging.
   • Some reflective posts were being read by other teachers and those lessons were being used in classrooms around the world.
   • Example - Alex's reflective post on a Maths lesson about fractions using donuts.
6. Building Relationships
   • Students from Ocean Grove PS went to Roslyn PS to teach blogging. (Link - 5KN's blog)
   • This built a connection between the two schools that enabled Roslyn students to ask further questions through their blogs.
   • Students also learnt how to ask for help from other bloggers when they saw something they liked on their blog.
   • When their turn came to answer a question, they were more inclined to help.
   • Example - comments on Brad's blog from some Roslyn students.
   • Some students who went on holidays continued to blog about their adventures. Example - Keely's post about visiting Wet 'n Wild in Queensland.

Unachieved Outcomes

1. Connection between home and the classroom
   • We were expecting to have parents reading and commenting on their children's blogs.
   • To our knowledge, this didn't happen.
   • Perhaps they don't know how to either!?!
   • We probably needed to explicitly promote the blogs to the parents rather than rely on the students to show them.

Things we have learnt along the way

• No matter how engaging we make the lessons, our kids will still forget to bring/charge their Netbooks, making it very difficult to conduct blogging lessons.
• The Global Student platform is harder to set up, offers more functionality and less flexibility.
• The Edublogs platform is easier to set up, has less functionality (unless you become a supporter or purchase a campus edition) and more flexibility.
• The kids love widgets!
• When you create accounts for the kids, opt for Usernames and Passwords that they already use (School Network, SuperClubsPlus, Mathletics, Smart Kiddies, etc). Otherwise you will spend a lot of time giving out forgotten details.
• It only takes 10 minutes or so for experienced Grade 5's to publish a reflective post. A great extension task for early finishers in any lesson.
• The parents did not use the blogs as we expected.